Dressed for Death (36 page)

‘Which of you is in charge?’
Brunetti asked.

A small red-headed man looked up
from one of the calculators and said, ‘I am. Are you Commissario Brunetti?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Brunetti answered,
coming to stand beside him and extending his hand.

‘I’m Captain de Luca.’ Then less
formally, taking Brunetti’s hand, he added, ‘Beniamino.’ He waved his hand over
the papers. ‘You wanted to know who was in charge of all of this at the bank?’

‘Yes.’

‘It looks, right now, like it was
all handled by Mascari. His key codes have been tapped into all of the
transactions, and what look like his initials appear on many of the documents
we’ve got here.’

‘Could that have been faked?’

‘What do you mean, Commissario?’

‘Could someone else have changed
these documents to make it look like Mascari had handled them?’

De Luca thought about this for a
long time, then answered, ‘I suppose so. If whoever did it had a day or two to
work on the files, I suppose he could have done it.’ He considered this for a
while, as if working out an algebraic formula in his head. ‘Yes, anyone could
have done it, if he knew the key codes.’

‘In a bank, how private are those
access codes?’

‘I would imagine they aren’t
private at all. People are always checking one another’s accounts, and they
need to know the codes in order to get into them. I would say it could be very
easy.’

‘What about the initials on the
receipts?’

‘Easier to forge than a
signature,’ de Luca said.

‘Is there any way to prove that
someone else did it?’

Again, de Luca considered the
question for a long time before he answered. ‘With the computer entries, not at
all. Maybe the initials could be shown to be false, but most people just
scribble them on things like this; often it’s difficult to tell them apart or,
for that fact, to recognize your own.’

‘Could a case be made that the
records had been changed?’

De Luca’s look was as clear as
his answer. ‘Commissario, you might want to make that case, but you wouldn’t
want to make it in a courtroom.’

‘So Mascari was in charge?’

De Luca hesitated this time. ‘No,
I wouldn’t say that. It looks like it, but it is entirely possible that the
records were changed to make it look like he was.’

‘What about the rest of it, the
process of selection for apartments?’

‘Oh, it’s clear that people were
chosen to get apartments for reasons other than need and, in the case of those
who received money, that poverty didn’t have much to do with a lot of the
grants.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘In the first case, the letters
of application are all here, divided into two groups: those who did get
apartments and those who were turned down.’ De Luca paused for a moment. ‘No, I’m
overstating the case. A number of the apartments, a large number of them, went to
people who seemed to have real need, but the letters of application for almost
a quarter of the applications come from people who aren’t even Venetian.’

‘The ones who were accepted?’
Brunetti asked.

‘Yes. And your boys haven’t even
finished checking on the complete list of tenants.’

Brunetti glanced towards
Vianello, who explained, ‘They’ve gone through about half of the list, and it
looks like a lot of them are rented to young people who live alone. And who
work nights.’

Brunetti nodded. ‘Vianello, when
you have a complete report on everyone on both lists, let me have it.’

‘It’s going to take at least
another two days, sir,’ Vianello said.

‘There’s no longer any need to
hurry, I’m afraid.’ Brunetti thanked de Luca for his help and went back up to his
office.

It was perfect, he reflected,
about as perfect as anyone could hope. Ravanello had spent his weekend all to
good purpose, and the records now showed that Mascari had been in charge of the
accounts of the Lega. What better way to explain those countless millions that
had been pilfered from the Lega than to lay them at the feet of Mascari and his
transvestites? Who knew what he had got up to when he travelled for the bank,
what orgies he had not engaged in, what fortunes he had not squandered, this
man who was too frugal to make a longdistance call to his wife? Malfatti,
Brunetti was sure, was far from Venice and would not soon reappear, and he had
no doubt that Malfatti would be recognized as the man who collected the rents
and who had arranged that a percentage of the charity cheques be given back to
him as a condition of their being granted in the first place. And Ravanello? He
would reveal himself as the intimate friend who, out of mistaken loyalty, had
not betrayed Mascari’s sinful secret, never imagining what fiscal enormities
his friend had engaged in to pay for his unnatural lusts. Santomauro? No doubt
there would be a first wave of ridicule as he was revealed to have been such a
gullible tool of his banker friend, Mascari, but, sooner or later, popular
opinion was bound to see him as the selfless citizen whose instinct to trust
had been betrayed by the duplicity to which Mascari was driven by his unnatural
lust. Perfect, absolutely perfect and not the slightest fissure into which
Brunetti could introduce the truth.

* * * *

Chapter Twenty-Six

That
night, the high moral purpose of Tacitus provided Brunetti no consolation, nor
did the violent destinies of Messalina and Agrippina serve as vindication of
justice. He read the grim account of their much-merited deaths but could not
rid himself of the realization that the evil spawned by these malevolent women
endured long beyond their passing. Finally, well after two, he forced himself
to stop reading and spent what remained of the night in troubled sleep,
assailed by the memory of Mascari, of that just man, dispatched before his
time, his death even more sordid than those of Messalina and Agrippina. Here,
as well, evil would long endure his passing.

The morning was suffocating, as
though a curse had been laid upon the city, condemning it to stagnant air and
numbing heat, while the breezes abandoned it to its fate and went elsewhere to
play. As he passed through the Rialto market on his way to work, Brunetti
noticed how many of the produce vendors were closed, their usual spots in the
ordered ranks of stalls gaping open like missing teeth in a drunkard’s smile.
No sense trying to sell vegetables during Ferragosto: residents fled the city,
and tourists wanted only
panini
and
acqua minerale.

He arrived early at the Questura,
reluctant to walk through the city after nine, when the heat grew worse and the
streets even more crowded with tourists. He turned his thoughts from them. Not
today.

Nothing satisfied him, not the
thought that the illegal dealings of the Lega would now be stopped, and not the
hope that de Luca and his men might still find some thread of evidence that
would lead them to Santomauro and Ravanello. Nor did he have any hope of
tracing either the dress or the shoes that Mascari had been wearing: too much
time had already passed.

In the midst of this grim
reverie, Vianello burst into his office without knocking and shouted, ‘We’ve
found Malfatti!’

‘Where?’ Brunetti asked, getting
up and moving towards him, suddenly filled with energy.

‘At his girlfriend’s, Luciana
Vespa, over at San Barnaba.’

‘How?’

‘Her cousin called us. He’s on
the list, been getting a cheque from the Lega for the last year.’

‘Did you make a deal?’ Brunetti
asked, not at all disturbed by the illegality of this.

‘No, he didn’t even dare ask. He
told us he wanted to help.’ Vianello’s snort told how much faith he put in
this.

‘What did he tell you?’ Brunetti
asked.

‘Malfatti’s been there for three
days.’

‘Is she in the file?’

Vianello shook his head. ‘Just
the wife. We’ve had someone in the apartment next to hers for two days, but
there’s been no sign of him there.’ While they spoke, they walked down the
stairs to the office where the uniformed branch worked.

‘Did you call a launch?’ Brunetti
asked.

‘It’s outside. How many men do
you want to take?’

Brunetti had never been directly
involved with any of Malfatti’s many arrests, but he had read the reports. ‘Three.
Armed. And with vests.’

Ten minutes later, he and
Vianello and the three officers, these last ballooned out and already sweating
from the thick bullet-proof vests they wore over their uniforms, climbed aboard
the blue and white police launch that stood, motor running, in front of the
Questura. The three officers filed down into the cabin, leaving Brunetti and
Vianello on deck to try to catch what little breeze was created by their
motion. The pilot took them out into the
bacino
of San Marco, then
turned right and headed up towards the entrance to the Grand Canal. Glory swept
past on both sides as Brunetti and Vianello stood, heads together, talking
against the force of the wind and the roar of the motor. They decided that
Brunetti would go to the apartment and try to make contact with Malfatti. Since
they knew nothing about the woman, they had no idea what her involvement with
Malfatti might be, and so her safety had to be their chief concern.

At that thought, Brunetti began
to regret having brought the officers along. If passers-by saw four policemen,
three of them heavily armed, standing near an apartment, a crowd was sure to
form, and that would draw the attention of anyone in the building.

The launch pulled up at the Ca’
Rezzonico vaporetto stop, and the five men filed off, much to the surprise and
curiosity of the people waiting for the boat. Single file, they walked down the
narrow
calle
that led to Campo San Barnaba and then out into the open
square. Though the sun had not yet reached its zenith, heat radiated up from
the paving stones and seared at them from below.

The building they sought was at
the far right corner of the
campo,
its door just in front of one of the
two enormous boats which sold fruit and vegetables from the embankment of the
canal which ran alongside the
campo.
To the right of the door was a
restaurant, not yet open for the day, and beyond it a bookstore. ‘All of you,’
Brunetti said, conscious of the stares and comments the police and their
machine-guns were causing among the people around them, ‘get into the
bookstore. Vianello, you wait outside.’

Awkwardly, seeming too big for it,
the men trooped through the door of the store. The owner stuck her head out,
saw Vianello and Brunetti, and ducked back into the shop without saying
anything.

The name ‘Vespa’ was written on a
piece of paper taped to the right of one of the bells. Brunetti ignored it and
rang the one above. After a moment, a woman’s voice came across the intercom.
^‘
Si?’

‘Posta
, Signora. I have a registered
letter for you. You have to sign for it.’

When the door clicked open,
Brunetti turned back to Vianello, ‘I’ll see what I can find out about him. Stay
down here, and keep them off the street.’ The sight of the three old women who
now surrounded him and Vianello, shopping trolleys parked beside them, made him
regret even more bringing the other officers with him.

He opened the door and went into
the entrance, where he was greeted by the heavy, thudding sound of rock music
spilling down towards him from one of the upper floors. If the bells on the
outside corresponded to the location of the apartments, Signorina Vespa lived
one floor above, and the woman who let him in on the floor above her. Brunetti
walked quickly up the stairs, passed the door to the Vespa apartment, from
which the music blasted.